[Minutemen]

And maybe not. Could be just old age and tired.

[Alex Murphy]

Today there was a sort of semi-confirmation of this reading of events from Portuguese Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, a veteran Vatican insider who's 80 and thus won't take part in the coming conclave. Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli asked Saraiva Martins if Vatileaks and the other scandals of the last couple of years might have been part of the reason Benedict reached this decision. "I imagine they might have influenced it," Saraiva Martins said. As revelations go, it's not exactly a thunderclap.

"Sort of"...."semi-"...."might have". And that also means "might not have". The National Catholic Reporter's John Allen saw fit to write an entire column around this "not exactly a thunderclap"? What a waste of time.

[Buckeye McFrog]

something needs to be fixed in the internal management of the Vatican. His resignation suggests that given his age and perhaps his skill set, he's concluded he's not the one to fix it.

A massive re-org with a purge/housecleaning of staff. And at 85 and faltering, one can easily see how he might not feel up to such a task.

[Smokin' Joe]

The failure of the writer to properly address Pope Benedict and instead only call His Holiness “Benedict” indicates the bias the writer has against the pontiff. That alone is sufficient.

[TonyInOhio]

National Catholic Reporter is to Catholisism what David Brooks is to Conservatism.

[Domangart]

He is old and on his second pacemaker. A slow fade out.

[livius]

Actually, I read a very good (I thought) analysis by a Spanish blogger who seems to have some inside knowledge of the Vatican. He said that Benedict simply felt that he could not handle the Curia anymore, and that Benedict is genuinely frail and fears that if anything further happens to him, the Curia will simply take over and do whatever its members feel like doing. They have NOT been supportive of BXVI, and have in fact impeded and undermined him (the whole Vatileaks mess, the mishandling of the Williams matter, and the failure to enforce his decrees in the sex abuse cases or even his decree making the Latin Mass more available are all attributable to various members of the Curia - and may well have been intentional rather than the product of incompetence, in many cases).

The blogger explained that BXVI had seen JPII grow weaker and unable to control these apparatchiks, who simply ignored his directives and did what they wanted, often invoking his name because he was by then so out of it that he couldn’t oppose them. So essentially, because of the Pope’s weakness, the Church was being governed by a bunch of faithless, useless (mostly) Italian bureaucrats. BXVI did not want this to happen to him or the Church under his authority.

I think one of the major tasks of the next Pope will be to blast the lairs of the Curia and get rid of most of them with some kind of major reorganization. One of BXVI’s problems was probably that, after all his years at the Vatican, he was too well known to the Curia and too accustomed to the dysfunctional situtation to immediately take the steps necessary when he took over. This let it fester and gave them time to dig themselves in more deeply.

That’s also the reason that he did this so abruptly, catching them completely off guard - so they would not have time to plot.

[ejonesie22]

One cannot just simply retire/resign a post of any significance without there being an immediate judgment of scandal/ulterior motives.

My God bless Pope Benedict in his final years and embrace him when he returns home.

[Sun]

The Catholic Reporter is NOT Catholic. It reminds me of Catholics for “Choice.”

Please don’t believe anything they say.